According to one of the foundational Buddhist teachings, we are doomed to be “blown about” by Eight Worldly Winds unless we engage in spiritual practice: Gain and loss, success and failure, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Personally, I find this a vivid and useful metaphor for the human experience. I share an excerpt from a Pali sutta about the Eight Worldly Winds, and then explore what it means to be “blown about” by them, and what we can do about it.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
What Should You Do with Yet Another Buddhist Teaching?
The Eight Worldly Winds in a Pali Canon Sutta
The Experience of the Eight Worldly Winds
What Does It Mean to Be “Blown About” by the Eight Worldly Winds?
Abandoning Welcoming and Rebelling with Respect to the Eight Worldly Winds
An Example of Working with a Worldly Wind
What Should You Do with Yet Another Buddhist Teaching?
Today I’m going to discuss a Buddhist teaching called the Eight Worldly Winds. As I’ve said a number of times before, if you think of the Dharma as a tomato, there are many different ways to slice it. Today I’m going to talk about one of those ways, which you are welcome to make use of, or not, depending on how it resonates with you.
According to one of the foundational Buddhist teachings – meaning, teachings dating back to the time of Shakyamuni Buddha a couple thousand years ago – we are doomed to be “blown about” by Eight Worldly Winds unless we engage in spiritual practice. The eight winds form four pairs: Gain and loss, success and failure, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Personally, I find this a vivid and useful metaphor for the human experience.
I’m going to start by sharing an excerpt from a Pali sutta about the Eight Worldly Winds, and then explore what it means to be “blown about” by the winds, and what we can do about it.
Before I begin, though, a note on how to receive/hold/use this teaching: Sometimes Buddhism may seem negative – pointing out how we create our own suffering, calling attention to our faults and delusions, emphasizing how we need to be detached from the world and let go of self, etc. For example, the Pail Sutta I’m going to quote from is called “The Failings of the World.” However, the foundational Buddhist idea is that our delusions obstruct our freedom, wisdom, and joy, and that we can free ourselves from our delusions and learn a better way to live. So indeed, many Buddhist teachings start with a diagnosis of a mental/spiritual “illness,” but then they talk about how we can cure ourselves! If you initially think a teaching is a little too negative, you may find it useful in the end if you can temporarily tolerate it.
Also, Dharma study is about exposure to the teachings. If you never read, hear, or otherwise encounter something, it will not be available to you. When you first encounter a teaching, it may or may not seem appealing, clear, or useful. Maybe it will never end up being useful to you. That’s okay. Just let the teaching pass through, don’t worry about it, let it go. But if it intrigues you – whether it inspires or bothers you – it can be fruitful to engage it further. Carry it with you, using it to frame your practice, or as a basis for reflection or improvisation, for as long as it’s helpful.
The Eight Worldly Winds in a Pali Canon Sutta
I’m going to share a passage from the Pali Canon that addresses the Eight Worldly Winds. This is from the “Lokavipatti Sutta: The Failings of the World,” translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
“Monks, these eight worldly conditions spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly conditions. Which eight? Gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, & pain. These are the eight worldly conditions that spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly conditions.” [i]
There’s more to the passage I want to share, but I’ll pause here for a couple translation notes. As far as I can tell, Thanissaro is translator who tends to stay truer to the character of the Pali words rather than being more interpretive. I am always intrigued when, as he does in this case, he chooses to depart from what you might say are the “typical” translations for Pali terms in classical teachings (usually the ones that the first translators into English used, and everyone just got used to them).
This teaching is most popularly described as the “Eight Worldly Winds” or “Eight Worldly Concerns,” but in this sutta Thanissaro translates them as “eight worldly conditions.” However, even though the sutta doesn’t call the conditions “winds,” it says that these conditions “spin after the world” and the world “spins after” them. This language definitely suggests forces that leave a turbulent wake – the world of desire keeps spinning, leaving a windy wake like a big semi-truck on a highway, and then the turbulence keeps the world spinning, in a never-ending cycle.
Thanissaro also uses a couple different terms for the winds than those I mentioned earlier. Instead of naming one pair of the worldly winds “success and failure,” Thanissaro calls them “status and disgrace.” I’ll talk more about the nature of these winds later, but for now consider how success and failure can be considered largely objective terms, while status and disgrace clearly refer to the social repercussions. Similarly, Thanissaro uses the term “censure” instead of “blame” for the worldly wind that is paired with praise. Again, “blame” could be seen as more objective (as in, you really are responsible for something), compared with “censure,” which is a social repercussion and something we could end up receiving through no fault of our own. If Thanissaro’s translations are accurate, four out of eight of the worldly winds (status, disgrace, censure, and praise) are primarily about our relationships with other people – and that rings true in my own experience.
Back to the sutta (note that “an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person” is someone who does not study and practice the Dharma, while those of us who do so with at least some measure of success are called “well-instructed disciples of the noble ones”):
“For an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person there arise gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, & pain. For a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones there also arise gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, & pain. So what difference, what distinction, what distinguishing factor is there between the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones and the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person?” [ii]
This is a very significant passage. A person who successfully practices the Dharma also experiences the Eight Worldly Winds. Practice does not prevent the negative experiences of loss, disgrace, censure, or pain. We do our best to avoid these things, of course, and our practice might even help us do that, but we are not in complete control here. Stuff happens. Which raises the question, “If practice doesn’t prevent you from experiencing the Eight Worldly Winds, what is it good for?” The sutta goes on:
“…Gain arises for an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person. He does not reflect, ‘Gain has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, & subject to change.’ He does not discern it as it actually is.
“[Similarly] Loss arises… Status arises… Disgrace arises… Censure arises… Praise arises… Pleasure arises…
“Pain arises. He does not reflect, ‘Pain has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, & subject to change.’ He does not discern it as it actually is.
“His mind remains consumed with the gain. His mind remains consumed with the loss… with the status… the disgrace… the censure… the praise… the pleasure. His mind remains consumed with the pain.
“He welcomes the arisen gain and rebels against the arisen loss. He welcomes the arisen status and rebels against the arisen disgrace. He welcomes the arisen praise and rebels against the arisen censure. He welcomes the arisen pleasure and rebels against the arisen pain. As he is thus engaged in welcoming & rebelling, he is not released from birth, aging, or death; from sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, or despairs. He is not released, I tell you, from suffering & stress.” [iii]
The Experience of the Eight Worldly Winds
Let’s reflect for a bit on these eight worldly conditions/winds. Remember this teaching isn’t about judgment, as in you are bad or weak if you find yourself buffeted by these winds. Instead, this is an objective observation of the human condition.
Gain & loss… in a sense, we can gain status, praise, and pleasure, other worldly winds, but if we exclude those for now, what else can we gain and lose? Material possessions, security, health, love, friendship, a happy and stable family life, skills, knowledge, abilities, strength, beauty, a comfortable home… We work hard for many of these things, and we gain happiness from them. We fear their loss, subtly or acutely, and experience grief, trauma, and/or stress when we lose them.
Status & disgrace… Our status may be built on our job or career, professional advancement, promotion, power, influence, income, wealth, fame, or relationships with important people. This wind involves taking satisfaction from these things largely as status symbols, as ways to build up our sense of self, as opposed to the pleasure we may derive from them in a more direct way (which is a different worldly wind). Disgrace may come in the form of losing our job, or being demoted, or becoming obsolete and having to work a low-status, low-paying job, or being caught in a crime or terrible mistake, or suffering from relative poverty (not so much because of the lack of resources but because of the loss of status). When we experience the winds of status or disgrace, we have usually attached our sense of ourselves to what we have achieved or attained.
Praise & censure… It is wonderful to get positive feedback from people. We know we’re on the right track when what we’re doing is admired, and people say we’re helpful, smart, admirable, strong, honorable, spiritual, ethical, skilled, loveable, kind, generous, etc. A good reputation is very valuable. We’re social creatures living within a social web; we mutually define what, within our culture or subculture, is praiseworthy versus what requires censure. Look at how the definitions of such things have changed over the last 100 years! So, appreciating praise and trying to avoid censure is not entirely a shallow thing, it’s a human thing. When people change their minds about us – whether we recognize we did something worthy of censure, or whether we find the whole situation unjust – it is very painful, disorienting, disempowering, etc.
Pleasure & pain… Think of all the sources of pleasure in your life – health, relationships, food, travel, music, sex, exciting experiences, gardening, reading, games, artistic expression, service, etc. We derive joy from these things, they give our lives meaning, and we anticipate pleasure. It motivates us to work, it allows us to relax and recuperate, it is a way to bond with other people. Pain, on the other hand, can be emotional or physical, and can be associated with the loss of pleasure, or with a whole new phenomenon like illness, aging, trauma, loss, attack, betrayal, or unfortunate circumstances like being in the middle of a war, economic depression, pandemic, or climate crisis.
The Eight Worldly Winds do a pretty good job of summing up with realities of human life, positive and negative. Notably, within the Buddhist cosmology of the Six Realms of existence, the “human realm” is characterized as a mixed bag, disorienting in part because it can be so sweet and so terrible. The joys of gain, status, praise, and pleasure are real, but there is no way to live a human life and experience only those winds. The winds come in pairs, and like the real wind, they can change direction at any time. I like the metaphoric imagery of the Eight Worldly Winds; while we can improve our odds of experiencing one wind over another, ultimately, we don’t have much control over which ones are moving through our life at any given time.
What Does It Mean to Be “Blown About” by the Eight Worldly Winds?
What does it mean to be “blown about” by these winds? The Buddha says in the Lokavipatti Sutta that an “uninstructed run-of-the-mill person” – an ordinary person who is not living deliberately, who has not heard the teachings, who is living out of karmic conditioning – “does not discern [what they are encountering as] inconstant, stressful, & subject to change.”
Another way to put what the Buddha is saying about those who don’t practice is that they fail to recognize the Four Noble Truths. All things are impermanent, constantly changing, and ungraspable. When we identify with them, when we try to hold on to them, we will suffer. This isn’t saying things are never pleasant, peaceful, or enjoyable, just that if we base our happiness on impermanent things, our lives will be full of dukkha (dis-ease, suffering, or dissatisfactoriness). Even when things are going well, we live with a vague sense of anxiety about the future. On the other hand, when things are going badly – when we’re being buffeted by the winds of loss, disgrace, censure, or pain – we often react with fear and resistance instead of taking solace in the impermanent and ungraspable nature of conditions.
The sutta continues by saying that if someone encounters the worldly winds but doesn’t practice, “His mind remains consumed.” (Note: When I read passages like this, I always inwardly acknowledge that Buddhism isn’t the only way to practice.)
What does it feel like when our “minds are consumed” with something? We know it! We’re usually happy to have our minds consumed with thoughts of gain, satisfaction from gain, well-deserved status, fame, praise, and pleasure. Isn’t this what life is about? Procuring what makes us happy, maintaining it, protecting it, holding on to it, getting more of it? When our minds are consumed with the positive, though, we are unlikely to give much thought or energy to practice. We are like the beings in the Buddhist heaven realm, who are so caught up in their pleasures – both material and spiritual – they never give a thought to Dharma practice.
If we don’t practice during the good times, we will likely be unprepared for a change in the wind. Loss, disgrace, censure, and pain will come to us at some point, in some form. If we have based our equanimity, happiness, sense of self and meaning on impermanent, conditional things, we are likely to end up quite lost when the winds change. Without a strong practice, our minds will then be consumed with the negative: the grief of loss, the frustration of disgrace, the shame of censure, the agony of pain.
Finally, the sutta says that person who does not practice is “engaged in welcoming and rebelling.” In other words, we engage in grasping after what we want, and pushing away what we don’t want. Significantly, welcoming and rebelling are about action. The basic feelings of like and dislike are natural, and we can’t do much about them. Grasping and aversion, or welcoming and rebelling, are the next step down the chain of causation, when we spin our basic feelings into impulses, desires, plans, rationalizations, and actions. Notably, according to the Buddhist point of view, we can commit actions of body, speech, or mind, so you can definitely engage in welcoming and rebelling inside your own head, without it necessarily manifesting as speech or physical action.
What’s wrong with welcoming and rebelling? Again, Buddhist teachings aren’t about making moral judgement, condemning us for getting caught up in grasping or aversion. What wrong with welcoming and rebelling is that they keep us caught up in suffering. As the sutta says, as long we’re caught up, we’re “not released from suffering and stress.” We’re allowing ourselves to be blown about by the Eight Worldly Winds like a tumbleweed caught in the wake of a semi-trailer – first sucked forward by grasping for what we want, then pushed from behind by what we’re trying to avoid, then thrown all over by the overall turbulence.
To get a better sense of what welcoming and rebelling means with respect the Eight Worldly Winds, it may help to explore the words “welcome” and “rebel.” When we welcome someone into our home, we permit them in, we communicate that their presence is wanted. We greet the visitor with, “Yes, I want this!” (Assuming they are truly welcome.) When gain, status, praise, and pleasure visit our life, we not only welcome them in, we hope they will stay. Now imagine your home is invaded by very unwelcome visitors, like rats. You naturally rebel against their presence, doing anything you can to get them to leave.
The thing is, welcoming and rebelling make some sense in this analogy about visitors to your home, but the same behavior causes problems when it comes to the Eight Worldly Winds in a more general sense. The narrative of control we might have about our home applies less and less the further out you go in time and space. It makes no sense welcome gain, status, praise, and pleasure like special guests, and try to convince them to stay, while rebelling against experiences of loss, disgrace, censure, and pain – hoping that through our lack of hospitality they disappear sooner than later. This is like welcoming the sun in the morning as if doing so will make it shine brighter and stay up in the sky longer, and then cursing at the clouds and the twilight when they inevitably arrive.
Abandoning Welcoming and Rebelling with Respect to the Eight Worldly Winds
Fortunately, there is a better way! That’s what Buddhism is about. Buddhist doesn’t say, “Avoid caring about or enjoying anything, because everything’s going to change and then you’ll feel pain and disappointment.”
Instead, Buddhism says, “You think your happiness and peace of mind is dependent which of the Eight Worldly Winds are blowing through your life, but that is not the case. A deep, unconditional happiness and peace of mind is accessible as soon as you ‘discern things as they actually are’ and ‘abandon welcoming and rebelling.’”
To quote the Lokavipatti Sutta once more:
“Now, gain arises for a well-instructed disciple of the noble ones. He reflects, ‘Gain has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, & subject to change.’ He discerns it as it actually is.
“[Similarly] Loss arises… Status arises… Disgrace arises… Censure arises… Praise arises… Pleasure arises…
“Pain arises. He reflects, ‘Pain has arisen for me. It is inconstant, stressful, & subject to change.’ He discerns it as it actually is.
“His mind does not remain consumed with the gain. His mind does not remain consumed with the loss… with the status… the disgrace… the censure… the praise… the pleasure. His mind does not remain consumed with the pain.
“He does not welcome the arisen gain, or rebel against the arisen loss. He does not welcome the arisen status, or rebel against the arisen disgrace. He does not welcome the arisen praise, or rebel against the arisen censure. He does not welcome the arisen pleasure, or rebel against the arisen pain. As he thus abandons welcoming & rebelling, he is released from birth, aging, & death; from sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs. He is released, I tell you, from suffering & stress.
“This is the difference, this the distinction, this the distinguishing factor between the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones and the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person.”[iv]
When we discern things as they actually are, we see they are impermanent and empty of inherent, enduring, graspable, essence. This is a very important point. It’s not just that you can insulate yourself emotionally by thinking of things as impermanent, it’s that they really impermanent and empty. That’s reality. When we relate to things as if they and we have some kind of inherent, enduring self-nature – as if the negative worldly winds actually detract from us, and the positive winds actually add to us, we’re deluded. We’re not acting in accord with reality, which means things are bound to get difficult.
The term “welcome” might make it difficult to get your mind around what it means not to welcome something pleasant in your life. Welcome is a pretty positive term, and in English it can refer to an open-handed attitude of appreciation that isn’t a problem. To use the analogy I mentioned earlier, you might go out to welcome the sun in the morning, but without deluding yourself that your action is going to make the sun stay in the sky or keep the clouds away. You might just go outside and appreciate the sun’s warmth. So, what’s going a step too far, and getting blown about by a worldly wind?
It’s difficult to describe these subjective, internal experiences in words… but maybe it would be a little more accurate to say that the problem arises when we try to “appropriate” a positive wind, or “fight” a negative wind. When we try to appropriate the wind, we’re trying to get it to blow stronger or longer, or to own it, take credit for it, or capture it. When we fight a negative wind, we don’t simply take shelter from it, we try to make it stop by complaining or searching for its source. Clearly, it’s futile to try to appropriate or fight the actual wind, but somehow these activities make sense to us when it comes to the eight worldly conditions.
If we abandon trying to appropriate or fight the Eight Worldly Winds, what is it like when we encounter them? When we experience gain, status, praise, or pleasure, we think, “Ah, a pleasant wind is blowing.” Instead of attempting to hold on to things or identifying ourselves with them, we feel gratitude for their presence and include the reality that this too will change. (Note: Not “holding on” to things doesn’t mean we don’t take care of things and try to make the good times last. Remember, practice is mostly about a subtle, internal, but transformative shift in your attitude.) When we experience loss, disgrace, censure, or pain, we think, “Ah, an unpleasant wind is blowing.” We refrain from taking things too personally, and take solace in the thought that “this too will pass.”
An Example of Working with a Worldly Wind
Talking about skillful and unskillful ways to respond to the Eight Worldly Winds can get kind of abstract. What happens in our own, direct experience when we “discern things as they actually are” and “abandon welcoming and rebelling” (or appropriating and fighting)? Let me offer an example, first exploring might look like if our minds remain consumed, and we are engaged in welcoming and rebelling.
Say the most precious thing in the world to you is family. The joy of family is the winds of pleasure and gain blowing in your life, perhaps mixed with some praise. Your children and grandchildren are the light of your life. Your relationships with family give your life meaning and are your main source of satisfaction. The most painful thing you can imagine is losing these people or having to watch them suffer. The primary focus of your life is family, and you may therefore have limited time for practice. The joys and sorrows of your family members are an absorbing drama. You may tend to interfere or worry too much, but it’s extremely painful and anxiety-producing to watch your family members making choices that cause suffering or disharmony to themselves or others.
As long as things are going relatively well, it may not be unmanageable to let your mind be consumed with family, and to engage in appropriating what’s good and fighting what’s bad. But what about when certain family members become alienated, and cut off relationship? When someone gets angry with you and accuses you of terrible things? Or when you have to watch someone you love surrender to addiction, or endure an abusive relationship, or suffer from a debilitating disease? Or when family members grow older, get busy, or move away, or die, and you get lonely?
Most of us, I think, are more than willing to face these painful situations in order to maintain loving relationships with family. The benefit far outweighs the cost. Fortunately, practice is not about cutting off relationships or feelings, so we never experience loss, disgrace, censure, or pain. After all, the whole point of the Eight Worldly Winds teaching is that the winds blow in our life no matter what we do.
Returning to our example, what does it really mean to discern family happiness as “inconstant, stressful, and subject to change?” This may sound negative, as if we’re trying to convince ourselves family happiness is illusory, undependable, or not worth working for. It may sound like Buddhism is telling us we’re suckers if we think family relationships can bring us real happiness.
But the essence of Buddhist teachings is more subtle than this. It’s about small but transformative shifts in your internal attitude. The key phrase is to “discern things as they actually are.” In the case of family happiness, perhaps we recognize how fragile and brief our lives are. How relationships are like a dance; it matters how we participate, but we’re not in complete control – and we don’t want to be! How the stories we tell about ourselves and our loved ones are only stories. How the emptiness of self is liberating, and therefore we are not defined by how good a parent, child, spouse, or sibling we have ended up being, and not defined by other people’s opinions of us, good or bad. Reality is limitless, and therefore so are the things you can discern about it.
Our discernment wakes us up from various ways we get consumed by the Eight Worldly Winds. Once awake, we can experiment with abandoning appropriating and fighting. Again, this is a subtle internal shift in attitude. It doesn’t mean we stop taking care of ourselves. It doesn’t mean we stop choosing pleasure over pain if we can manage to do so. What abandoning appropriating and fighting means is we disentangle our self-interest from our responses to life.
In the example of family happiness, if we abandon appropriating and fighting, we might let go of our ideas about how things are supposed to turn out, whether we’re talking about a family gathering or a kid’s career path. We might be able to acknowledge and address difficult family dynamics because we’re no longer attached to the idea that our family is harmonious and we’re a good parent, child, spouse, sibling, etc. Instead of being caught up in our own agenda, we might spend more time listening to and watching our loved ones. Instead of obsessing over a past injury, we might be able to accept the past and move on.
May the winds blow favorably in your life. And when they don’t, may you stay strong as they blow.
Endnotes
[i] “Lokavipatti Sutta: The Failings of the World” (AN 8.6), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (BCBS Edition), 4 July 2010, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an08/an08.006.than.html.
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Ibid
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